


Thoughts Like Smoke

by Bella_Bellona



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Internal Monologue, canon character death, cora/boyd is only vaguely implied, minor talk of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 00:36:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bella_Bellona/pseuds/Bella_Bellona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that she was here she wondered if she’d ever truly had a pack at all. Maybe it was some sort of fevered dream, like new moon nights when she wakes up crying and trying to cling to the memory of the scent of vanilla and the touch of cool hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thoughts Like Smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Autumn for beta'ing the hell out of this and cheer leading me 'till I finished. Any mistakes are my own and not a result of her awesome skills. This is my first teen wolf fic and my first fic in general in forever so I hope you like.

Cora didn’t have nightmares about fire and air choked black with smoke. 

She didn’t have nightmares about three months of bones aching, skin prickling, nerves raw with the need to change like the wolf was flaying her open from the inside. 

She had nightmares about giants with hands that stole her breath, swatted her out of the air like a gnat and slammed her to the ground hard enough to crack her shoulder blades. Because Cora was not a gnat, was not weak, was not fragile. Cora Evangeline Hale was an apex predator, a wolf of the Hale line, and anything that could bring her down like she was a human child was to be feared. 

She came back to Beacon Hills chasing the memory of smoke on the air and whispered rumors of a Hale Alpha reclaiming their rightful territory. They were rumors of a formidable young pack defeating a rogue alpha gone mad with pain and power, destroying an abomination, the Argents brought low. She didn’t realize then that the rumors were like a game of telephone whispered in Greek, they did not mention blood, betrayal, a trail of dead bodies and a too young pack filled with broken things. If you could even call what her brother had thrown together a pack. 

She barely knows any of them, these lost children who are supposed to belong to Derek, who are supposed to belong to her, because pack is family and more than family. She can’t feel them like she could feel her mother, sisters, uncle. She knows Stiles talks too much. But then anyone who talks more than Boyd did talks too much, as far as she’s concerned. At least he’s smart, and not as mired in his own insecurities as the others seem to be. There was something about him, though, an awareness, a darkness that sometimes made her skin prickle. She thinks he could lay them all to waste, some day. The problem now is that he thinks he knows her. She’s Derek’s sister and it’s enough for all of them to classify her, but she’s not that. She hasn’t been anyone’s sister in six years. 

Still, this was what she had now, a fragmented group of teenagers, an alpha who had seen far too much loss, and a scheming uncle back from the dead. This is what she left Belize for, and the relative safety of the Castillo Pack. She remembered firm hands, the sad eyes of Jack Castillo, Alpha’s Mate of the Castillo Pack who’d come to request council from Talia and had arrived only in time to drag a wailing eleven year old Cora from the smoldering ruins. The second and first degree burns that littered a third of her body were healed within a week. She did not speak at all for her first six months in Belize. It was an old pack, small but established and made up mainly of people much older than Cora, and a handful of very small children. They did not understand the sullen, angry girl they’d taken in, but they protected her, and when she left she left with their blessing. 

They were never her pack.

Now that she was here she wondered if she’d ever truly had a pack at all. Maybe it was some sort of fevered dream, like new moon nights when she wakes up crying and trying to cling to the memory of the scent of vanilla and the touch of cool hands.

Boyd had reminded her of her father, stoic and quiet and so damn strong. Terrifyingly strong. He had taken most of the torture the Alphas had inflicted on them in complete silence. Her own throat had been raw for days from screaming. She thinks maybe that’s why the Alphas tried to get Derek to kill Boyd first, why they did it themselves in the end. They fear what they can’t understand. They could never hope to understand someone who could keep silent when any of them would have screamed in his place. 

Vengeance is her anchor and she will only hold onto the things that make her stronger. She remembers her own screams. The way the taste of smoke burns down her throat, how Laura’s face must have looked, sick with recognition, when Peter ripped her in half, the fierce light fading from Erica’s eyes, the sound of Kali’s nails and Deucalion’s cane on marble floors, Boyds blood slick under her hands, and how easily Aiden’s skin ripped under her claws. She will not forget these things, not the way she’s forgotten the precise color of her mother’s eyes and the shape of her father’s smile. Not the way she’s forgotten what Derek sounds like when he laughs. 

She remembers with nauseating clarity the two days she spent thinking that Derek had died at the hands of the Alpha pack. The six years she spent knowing that he had been burned to ash in the fire that had claimed the rest of her family should have left her numb to the possibility of his death, but she’s never been able to be numb to death, not really, not when she’d spent that same six years dreaming that someone else had survived. Praying to a god she had never believed in that one more Hale was out there somewhere. The loft had reeked of blood and sex and a stranger when she had found Derek alive, staring out the windows like their view of concrete and steel was something he needed to commit to memory. His lip had split when she punched him but it healed too quickly to be satisfying. She needs him alive more than she needs vengeance.

The gauze is too tight on her head and the beep and whir of machines keeping people alive is making her skin crawl. She doesn’t understand how anyone can stand the smell of antiseptic and bleach and death. Derek is holding her hand and the only thing it does is remind her that the last person to do that was Boyd. She wonders if the memory of the things a person kills clings to their skin like a film of oil on water. She doesn’t think she’ll live long enough to feel Kali’s heart slow under her hand, to let Kali’s death settle over her skin like one more drop of oil. And that, out of everything, is her biggest regret.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me on tumblr of you want. It's heavenearthandhoratio.tumblr.com. I would love to have you but don't expect quality blogging.


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